Grand Prix 3

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Finally, Grand Prix 2 brought up to date! Well, sorta...

By IGN Staff

It's been a very long time since Grand Prix 2 came out. When it did, it ran under DOS, consumed all available computing power just to run half decently, and also had the misfortune to come out just before games began moving into Windows. Diehards like me left a bootable DOS session installed for IndyCar II, NASCAR and Grand Prix 2, but the gaming world moved on, and eventually, all but a few holdouts dumped their DOS-compatibility for new Windows only technology, and everyone began the long wait for Grand Prix 3 (and it was only a rumor that it would even happen!). Granted, we had to suffer through slew of wannabe F1 games for the PC (I won't name names because I wish to spare their developers the humiliation), but besides UbiSoft's attempt and perhaps EA's recent F1 2000, no one has seriously made people forget about waiting for the legendary Geoff Crammond to release another F1 masterpiece that would show all the other games to be the pretenders they really are. But is this what has happened?

First of all, in some areas Grand Prix 3 needed to address the gaping holes left by Grand Prix 2. Weather stands out as the number one missing item. How anyone can release a Grand Prix sim without some kind of weather is beyond me (as EA has also now learned the hard way). Also missing was multiplayer. It goes without saying that we all wanted to see really good use of 3D hardware, and we also didn't want another game which required a leading edge machine to run acceptably, and have to wait for machine speeds to double before the game would look the way it was designed to.

Other than these things, Grand Prix 2 was considered a masterpiece. The AI was generally solid, the gameplay was well balanced, driving aids made the game wonderfully accessible to novices, and the level of authenticity was high. So Grand Prix 3 needed to avoid fixing what was not broken and bring this game to the year 2000 in terms of technology.

The results are a mixed bag. For each item that was updated and modernized, something else was left in the DOS stone age, leaving my mouth hanging open in shock. I should have been a little suspicious when I saw that Microprose's staff and not the mastermind and head programmer, Geoff Crammond, did NOT do the 3D work. He just updated his software engine, leaving Microprose to pick and choose just what to put into the 3D hardware and how it would work. The result is a blend of 2D and 3D technology that works well from a gameplay standpoint, but often looks antiquated compared to newer games.

Some of the screenshots which accompany this review will reveal the game's graphical shortcomings. But the most obvious thing is the heavy use of 2D art and sprites in the game, taken right out of the DOS world. From a performance standpoint, this isn't a bad thing. Today's computers scoff at the simplicity of sprite manipulation, and blending in 2D objects keeps the frame rate from taking a dive because of an overly massive polygon count. The most obvious use of this comes when you are in the cockpit following a car. Canned sprites of cars are used for any car more than a car length ahead or behind you. The software just blips a copy of that car pointed in the correct direction. They did a good job for the most part. While you're racing this won't bother you much unless you're really looking. If you do, you'll see the car sink a bit into the road ahead or seem to float above it several inches from time to time as the canned sprite cannot possibly line up on a banked surface or an elevation change. As soon as you get within a car length, a little transformation occurs and the car is now a fully polygonal object that you can race with. This keeps the frame rate high. Was this a trade-off to gain performance at the expense of some aesthetics? Or are we just seeing a 2D relic that no one wanted to fix? Who knows? However, I do feel I can safely say that it doesn't really affect gameplay much, so we can note it as an example of how Grand Prix 3 differs from its competition its use (or rather non-use) of current technology.

The same is true for the pretty backgrounds. As I own all the current F1 titles, I did some screen-to-screen comparisons of the backdrops and overall image quality and in terms of re-creating the natural environment around a track, GP3 is unmatched. Others had to sacrifice detail because their worlds are polygonal. Unfortunately, some corners were cut. A classic example is curbing. In GP3, the curbing is not always true to the real life track. Red and white curbs are used most everywhere, even though in real life, some curbs are higher and are painted plain white. Imola stands out as such a place. Does this affect gameplay? You bet. Those curbs have to be bounced around on in real life to get a fast time, and they are much different in personality than curbs at, say, Brazil, because they are steeper. Unless you are cornering hard on them, you can generally deal with GP3's curbs without being thrown into a spin (unlike, ahem, UbiSoft's titles).

The other main problem with the 2D/3D graphics engine in Grand Prix 3 is that clipping is a mess, but it generally only really hurts on replay (screenshots are provided which show the clipping). Entire segments of walls are often removed completely to show cars, because the engine is incapable of clipping the bottom half of the car so you can see just the top over the barrier. This is simply not a competent graphics engine from that perspective, and causes artifacts and weird images to show up which destroy the suspension of disbelief.

The in-car view is pseudo 3D. If you have a 3D card, you can zoom in or out in your cockpit view. Sitting back provides a Grand Prix Legends style view with the cockpit and car way out in front of you, but you can actually see beyond the sides of your wheels, allowing you to look into and through turns (it's a major bummer that auto head panning was not included here ¿ these guys should look at Lankhor's F1 World Grand Prix for that!). The steering wheel turns, without any hands on it, and is full of all the information you need to race. You can see your tires, unlike GP2, and they look okay in shape, but in terms of their 3D appearance, there is almost none. The light reflection off of them is pixilated goo (see screenshot). This can be distracting if you're used to gorgeously realistic wheels such as those in F1WGP, but again, ultimately the job is not to stare at your tires or admire the pixilated trees but to drive really fast, so this doesn't affect gameplay much. It just demonstrates, yet again, that Microprose has delivered a dinosaur of a graphics engine.

The cars, when polygonal, are modeled well, and they look just fine from a replay view, complete with the helmet of the driver being moved around due to the high-speed turns. Smoke flies out from the wheels that lock up under braking, and in the rain a flume of nice looking spray flies up from the track. Speaking of weather, Geoff Crammond and Co. solved this problem with a vengeance. As the screenshots will show, the rain effects are just amazing. Every moment from the first drop of rain to the downpour to the sun drying the track is modeled very nicely. The weather can be pouring rain in one segment of the track and drying on another (particularly at Spa, which is so huge the weather can indeed vary dramatically throughout a single lap). At the beginning of every session, a bar chart for the next 2 hours shows up letting you know what the probabilities are of rain, and the relative probabilities for light, medium, or heavy rain. This lets you plan ahead and make last second changes, or change your pit stop strategy to account for the weather.

The tracks are generally fine in terms of their realism. I've seen some things to nitpick about, but that happens with every sim. The biggest offender, as I mentioned, is the curbing, but there are some banking inaccuracies and a couple of elevation changes I'd question. Again, this is the norm. I wish someone would really get it right but the odds of that happening after his many years of disappointment have made me cynical. Fortunately, the lap times are about right, and it'll take work to match or beat the real F1 times for most sim racers (I exclude the mutants whose genetic makeup lets them go 5 seconds faster than the rest of humanity in any given sim! Just kidding, guys).

The game modes are pretty simple, allowing you to practice, run a single race or a championship season. There is no fluff here in terms of playing modes. However, within the game, each session is modeled accurately and is customizable. You can alter the lengths of sessions, for instance. One thing that stands out as completely cool in my book is that you can save your race, anytime! Not just between sessions or when you're in the pits, but at any point you want. So, unlike all other competitors, anyone can reasonably attack a full-length race without having to dedicate uninterrupted hours to it!

I should also note that this game models the 1998 season, so expect to see the unlicensed Jacques Villeneuve listed as some generic bloke at Williams, the last year before Zanardi took over that seat. Fortunately, the GP3 hackers on the web have already put together 2000 carsets, which should update the game and the car performances to today's standards. Unfortunately, it means that such tracks as Indianapolis and Malaysia are not modeled in the game, but you still get to race Argentina, which is gone in current sims.

Replays will be automatically saved, but they aren't kept in one big stream for you to watch later. Rather, if you want to view replays and save them, you must save each lap in a separate file. If you want to save an entire race, you will need to go out of the race temporarily and save the last several laps to separate files, and then load and view each one separately. This, to put it bluntly, sucks. The only saving grace here is that for hot lapping and telemetry analysis it's nice to have your laps all packaged up for you. Depending upon the amount of memory you have and the number of AI cars that are on the track, you can temporarily pause, fetch and save a bunch of laps before they are wiped from memory and are gone forever. I did a 17-lap race at Monza and got every lap saved. There is a glitch here, however, in that the data logger doesn't kick in until lap 2 of a race, so perhaps the most interesting lap, the first one, cannot be replayed! The only hope you have is that you can hit the spacebar at any point in the game, hit "R" and watch the last 20 seconds from any car and any camera angle, including TV cams. So if you do something really special on lap 1 or just want to watch the start, make sure you're going in a straight line or doing something pretty safe, and then watch the last 20 seconds from as many different perspectives as possible. It's really fun watching passes this way. The downside is that you are taken right out of your rhythm, so make sure you remember what you were doing before you unpause the game!

A 3D tumble and damage model is implemented which can cause the car to roll over or otherwise catch air. Hitting someone in the rear wheel can make that half of the car go airborne, giving you a nice view of the underbody and the plank. Hitting something too hard can shear a wheel off, and you can have wings ripped off as well. Engine blow-ups and flameouts are also quite possible. The car, however, is built pretty strong, so most shunts into walls are forgiven with no damage. There is a threshold at some point at which the game decides that you merit serious punishment and it will appropriate rip off a piece of your car, but it's not like a few competitors where the slightest shunt would flatten a wheel.

A fully equipped garage is there to let you load and save setups, and there are two pages of setup screens (see screenshots) so this will help anyone who really wants to fine-tune the car. Laps can be fetched into the performance analyzer, graphed, and compared with one another. It's a great way to find out where your driving or car setup could be improved, but it's really for the hardcore sim fan. Thankfully, a huge manual is provided with a detailed tutorial on how to get the most out of telemetry and how to best find the racing line and go faster.

The really good news about this game is that is immensely playable. It's easier to drive throughout most of the driving envelope than its competitors, and that makes it easier to concentrate on racing. Sure, if you really want to be fast, you're going to be right on the edge and you might well lose control of your car, but the car is quite drivable within its limits using the default setups. Also provided is a full array of driving aids to help anyone drive, even if all they have is a keyboard. The aids will keep you on the racing line, suggest gears for you, or auto shift if you like. It will also keep your car indestructible, do your braking for you, etc. For the more hardcore, there is still some help in the customizability of controls, to change the linearity of steering response, how much steering assistance you want (set it to 0% and it's virtually impossible to catch a snap spin ¿ Mine is at 15%), and what the dead zones and sensitivities are for each axis. Unfortunately, in their 1996 cave, Microprose failed to notice that most driving controls are dual axis nowadays, so there is NO dual axis support in the game. If you want to left foot brake, you'll be on the same axis as your gas, unless you have some kind of setup where you have two game controllers plugged in, in which case you can use the second gameport to provide the other axis and get independent braking and throttle. But most of us will have to switch it to single axis and curse whoever was responsible for leaving out this support!

Force feedback is supported, but I'm very disappointed in its use. It tends to oscillate the force, and doesn't load up the spring rate during high G-cornering. It doesn't feel attached to the physics model at all. I cut the FF level to 50% so that I could still enjoy going over curbs but not have to fight with an out-of-phase oscillating spring exiting corners.

I haven't talked about the audio, yet. The engine sounds are just fine, but you cannot hear anyone else's engines around, in a departure from reality. Quite frankly, I'm not THAT bothered by it, but I admit that from time to time I would like to know someone is moving up on my left or right even before checking my mirror and seeing him. Also hearing their noise fade away would sure be useful if I didn't know whether they were gone or just in my blind spot right alongside me! There are no crew chiefs or TV announcers here. You're responsible to watch your dash and know when to pit and what to ask for. The pitting is done pseudo-automatically, with your planned stops being executed by your guys.

Unfortunately, I'll be playing this game alone. Network support is designed for LAN play, not Internet play. People can work around it, but my experience is that when it's designed for an effectively no-latency connection, the game bombs on the 'net.

So now let's just nitpicking about each section and look at the game as a complete piece? To find out whether we really had the best F1 on our hands, I did races in each of the three main contenders: F1 World Grand Prix, EA's F1 2000 and Grand Prix 3. My conclusion is that Grand Prix is the best overall package right now, at least for single player mode, in spite of its shortcomings. The biggest downfall of the other two products was the AI car behavior. I never felt like I was in a close race with other competitors. They would either run by me or run into me. EA's title was the worst in this department, although there is a patch and tweaks on the Internet to improve this. F1 WGP has a bad braking model and AI that doesn't really dice well with you, and we are still awaiting the patch. The car handling was the nicest in EA's sim, but that doesn't save the game if the AI was bad. The track graphics and car models in F1 WGP were hands down the most awesome I've seen, but again, if you can't race well with the AI, it's all for naught.

GP3, in spite of its deficiencies, gave me the most enjoyable overall racing experience. In a 17 lap race at Monza, I took the pole by a second or so at Monza, but then didn't get a good start. (I should note here that the 2D aspects of the graphics engine keep the frame rate high even with 21 other cars around me!) Then, trying to be aggressive to get back a position, fell well back to 16th place. With only 12 laps left, I didn't have a shot at the win, so I just patiently worked my way back through the field. What was interesting was that I'd opted for a setup with slightly more wings than my competitors. This made me faster than they were through the chicanes and the corners, but it meant they could draw away down the straights. I spent several laps doing the same lap time as the guy ahead of me, constantly getting off the corner, drafting and then getting alongside of him, only to have him hold his own right along side me and force me to back out to avoid crashing going into the next corner. But in the famous Parabolica turn I could get guys every time as they couldn't put down the power in this high-G increasing radius turn and I could turn inside of them and motor away. Using this strategy I moved up to 9th before the end of the race. The lap saver had every lap (save the first!) and I was able to store them on disk for later viewing and telemetry analysis. The race was very enjoyable and mirrors the experience I have every time I play this game.

The sum is greater than the parts. Though most every area of GP3 has something to gripe about, the whole game is still suitable for everyone from novices to aces, and no one area is so weak as to ruin the whole of the game.